Symbolic Reparation,Heritage and Political Transition in South Africa’s Eastern Cape

This article first examines the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendation of symbolic reparation for apartheid, and its effect on South African heritage. Second, it considers the relationship between public history and civic nation building in South Africa, as well as problems in trying to develop an inclusive public history through museums. Case studies drawn from Grahamstown and Mthatha in the Eastern Cape are explored as examples of the redevelopment of the old and establishment of the new public history as part of the negotiated transition.     

‘It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’: Colonial Governance and the ‘Disposal’ of Women and Girls in Early Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone

The colonial archive offers comparatively few glimpses of the individual lives of enslaved African women and girls brought to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and ‘liberated’ under the terms of the British Abolition Act of 1807. This article sets out to do four things: first, to consider what colonial sources reveal about how women and girls experienced and responded to becoming ‘liberated Africans’, and to the ‘disposal’ practices of the Liberated African Department – including schooling, indenture and arranged marriages. Second, it considers what factors might have shaped those experiences. Third, it seeks to make a contribution to the literature on marriage in early colonial Africa by considering whether, and to what extent, British colonial policy towards liberated African women in Sierra Leone meets a modern definition of government-led coerced or forced marriage. Finally, it evaluates the usefulness and limits of official archives, missionary records, court records and the accounts of self-styled British Sierra Leone experts for studying the experiences of women and girls, and indicates potential avenues for further research.     

Domestic espionage: David Park's Swallowing the Sun as Troubles thriller

David Park's standing as an author of finely observed works, in which individual frailties are pitted against larger scenarios of conflict and trauma, was recently acknowledged through his winning of the American Ireland Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Truth Commissioner, projects a model of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission onto a Northern Ireland setting, and won the 2009 Christopher Ewart Biggs Memorial Award. The novel this essay examines, Swallowing the Sun (2005), can be read as a re-working of the conventional Troubles thriller. In this novel, the traumas of domestic violence feed into and interweave with state violence in Belfast. Poverty and class inequities are highlighted as causes for both private and public conflict. David Park revises the Troubles thriller to suggest that the pressure to be quiet in the face of suffering is the real enemy to both individual and state welfare. Swallowing the Sun is a powerful challenge to established ideas about genre and context in Northern Ireland, and a moving work from a Northern Ireland author who has, until recently, been relatively overlooked.     

Truth and Decolonization: Filling the Educator Achievement Gap Darn It!

Public attention on the systemic oppression of Indigenous people in Canadian Residential Schools raised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) marks a possible turning point for Canada to enter a respectful relationship with First Nations. Calls for widespread education initiatives that promote Indigenous perspectives indicate a path to reconciliation. However, access to this path is obstructed by two barriers: 1) recurring colonial approaches to enacting Indigenous education policies; and 2) teachers’ bewilderment upon facing such a steep learning curve. In an attempt to overcome these barriers, I designed a workshop to assist educators and I approached teachers to engage on a grassroots level. The workshop developed from a combination of critical policy analysis and autoethnography to provide an accessible overview of Canada’s legacy of colonialism. Delivery of the workshop revealed participants’ readiness to learn about colonization in Canada, while exposing the need for capacity building within the Ontario public education system for Indigenous leadership to direct TRC initiatives.     

Civic Sacrament and Social Imaginaries in Transition: The Case of the South African Churches and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

This article reflects on a seminal moment within South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): the appearance of the African Initiated Churches (AICs) before the Commission in 1997. It demonstrates how this moment brought into relief divergent contestations of the public within South African Christianity in three ways: first, by situating the TRC within the liturgical performance of a reimagined South African nationality, making it a "civic sacrament" of reconciliation; second, by highlighting the formative role churches themselves played within this liturgy, deploying theological language to create a healed, secular body politic; third, by displaying the different social imaginary of the AICs—a social imaginary which interrupted the TRC's liturgical recreation of time and space, as well as challenging the historical relations between church and state in South Africa. The paper concludes with the question posed in this "interruption," a question that challenges the broader church with regard to fulfillment of the liturgy not in the secular nation-state, but in that City which is to come.     

Christianity and Justice in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Case Study in Religious Conflict Resolution

Abstract

Historically, international conflict resolution theorists have largely adopted the position that organized religion is an instigator of violence. As a result, these theories have tended to exclude religion as a force for peacebuilding. Recently, however, scholars have suggested that religion can contribute constructively to a theory of conflict resolution. Their general thesis is that, if religion played a significant part in people's lives, and if religion played a part in fuelling the conflict, then when resolving the conflict, religion must be at least taken into account. An example of a conflict resolution process in which religion, specifically Christianity, played a central role was South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In dialogue with leading critics of the TRC process, particularly Richard Wilson, this article examines the ambiguous role that Christianity played in influencing concepts of justice in the TRC.     

Heritage as future-making: aspiration and common destiny in Sierra Leone

This paper engages with an arising interest in heritage as a ‘future-making’ project, arguing that in a context such as Sierra Leone heritage work may be better understood as a reflection of aspirations for a ‘common destiny’, than the articulation of common pasts. It questions the centrality with which modern anxiety continues to frame heritage temporalities, drawing on anthropological engagements with contexts of development and social transformation to propose a non-linear model for mapping the relationship between the past and the present. Drawing on a recent surge in heritage work in Sierra Leone, I suggest that heritage has efficacy beyond the provision of emotional security in a context of rapid change, indeed that it may be implicated in the process of instituting and shaping change itself.     

Dealing with the past: Museums and heritage in northern ireland and Cape Town,South Africa

The experiences of post‐apartheid South Africa have often been used to open dialogue about Northern Ireland and the possible approaches to dealing with the legacy of the conflict. People in Northern Ireland have, for example, looked towards the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and policing in South Africa for further insights. This comparison of South Africa and Northern Ireland has now moved beyond being concerned predominantly with conflict resolution and has come to bear in the consideration of how we should present the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland’s museums and the value of preserving the built heritage of the Troubles. This paper uses the example of the ‘transformation’ in the South African heritage sector that came with the end of apartheid as a means to raise areas of concern that have resonance for Northern Ireland. It shows that for both Northern Ireland and South Africa it is important to think further about the impact of display, the power dynamics embedded in the construction of heritage, and the complexity of building a shared narrative from a contested past.     

The politics of being sorry: the Greensboro truth process and efforts at restorative justice

This paper examines the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC) to better understand the way the truth process in Greensboro, North Carolina intersects with conceptions of restorative justice and geographic understandings of the ‘right to the city.’ The GTRC was a grassroots truth process focused on a shooting of labor organizers in 1979 by Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party Members and the complicity of local officials in the violence. In 2006, the GTRC released its report to the citizens of Greensboro and its recommendations for the city touched off a contentious debate. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and archival research—I argue the GTRC process engages with notions of right to the city activism that challenges the right to the city literature to focus on broader discussions of racism, activism, and white privilege that emerges from critical race scholarship and contributes to the growth of robust, multiracial anticapitalist coalitions; an approach to scholarship on the right to the city that has broad academic purchase for social geography and urban political engagement in general.     

Cosmopolitan peacekeeping and peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: what can Africa contribute?

The article is organized into two main parts. First, it presents the termination of the conflict in Sierra Leone as a case‐study to examine the degree to which cosmopolitan values connecting peacekeeping and peacebuilding are (or are not) evident. The case‐study looks at the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) as a model of successful peacekeeping in the sense that everyday security was provided for the people of Sierra Leone through the deployment of a robust peacekeeping mission. This assessment needs to be qualified in relation to serious deficits still to be addressed in post‐conflict peacebuilding, yet the success of this mission does provide encouragement for those who see the construction of a cosmopolitan security architecture for Africa as both desirable and achievable. Second, it explores the degree to which an appropriate model of cosmopolitan peacekeeping might emerge at regional and continental levels in Africa through the development of the African Standby Force (ASF). What the case‐study presented here and the survey of the African Union (AU)/ASF in the second part of the article have in common is that taken together, they provide some evidence to suggest that, however fragile, the AU is beginning to define an agenda that represents a continent wide and, in that sense at least, a cosmopolitan response to African security issues.     

The diversity of identity: youth participation at the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In recent years, the transitional justice field has become increasingly concerned with ensuring meaningful participation from a wide range of actors. In response, a burgeoning scholarship has emerged, which aims to understand the interests and needs of these stakeholders, most notably women and children. Noticeably absent from this research is an examination of youth interests as distinct from children’s. Instead, the conflict identities of youth are most often conceived as inextricably tied to those of children. As a result, the narrow victim/perpetrator binary remains the dominant identity construction employed for understanding their involvement in conflict and transitional justice processes. Drawing on the case of the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article reveals that youth are more than passive subjects in the reconciliation process. It demonstrates that the interactions of youth with truth and reconciliation commission processes allow youth to exercise agency, and thus challenge the dominance of the victim/perpetrator identity construct. The article thus proposes an alternative way of framing youth participation, whereby the identities of youth in transitional contexts are represented as diverse and malleable.     

Fearsome people and places,narratives of street and hideout children in Freetown,Sierra Leone

This article is based on a GOAL Global field study of street children in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It draws on narrative accounts given by street children who have migrated to Freetown from rural Sierra Leone. The study used the participatory ranking method to generate data about children’s street and hideout (a room, shack or part of a building where children live in groups) lives post-migration. These data contained much about children’s fears, and the article explores their experience of fearsome people and places, showing that fear is a dominant aspect of these children’s lives. Fear shapes their day-to-day choices and decisions: their agency. It also suggests that agency should be seen as complex, contingent and sometimes paradoxical. The article concludes by identifying implications for social policy and practice, suggesting that these necessarily entail risky engagement with fearsome people in the liminal spaces of children’s street and hideout lives.     

Football in post-Conflict Sierra Leone

Abstract

As in all African nations, football is very popular in Sierra Leone. While there is a constant lack of equipment and the fields are far from perfect, boys and girls are practising the game with great motivation and dedication. Training starts with warming up. This warming up is characterised by rhythmic exercises, done in perfect synchrony. These rhythmic activities need to be acquired by practice. Young boys watch the older football players and try to imitate them. Also for the amputee football team, rhythm is an important aspect of the warm-up. Football in Sierra Leone is more than just a game. Football can be seen as a tool for rehabilitation and reintegration. It makes the footballers forget about the war. For the amputee players, football also brought back their human dignity and sense of recognition, making them feel part of society again. The rhythmic aspects during the warm-up can intensify this effect, increasing a sense of belonging to a group.     

The Chromatic Traveling-Salesmen Problem and Its Application to Planning and Structuring Geographic Space

The classical traveling-salesman problem involves the establishment of a tour around a set of points in a plane such that each point is intersected only once and the circuit is of minimal total length. When the length of a salesman's tour cannot exceed a specified constant, the problem becomes that of finding the fewest number of salesmen such that every city is visited by a salesman and the length of each salesman's tour does not exceed a specified constant. This is the chromatic traveling-salesmen problem. An algorithm for this problem is developed and is used to create periodic markets in parts of Sierra Leone. Fifteen rural areas were examined from Sierra Leone, and weekly market places were identified in each area. Salesmen were to be assigned to an area so that each market place was visited and each tour (or periodic ring) did not exceed forty hours. The chromatic traveling-salesmen algorithm was used to minimize the number of periodic rings needed for each area and provide the specific tour for each ring.     

Satellite Remote Sensing of Archaeological Vegetation Signatures in Coastal West Africa

This article discusses how archaeological sites in Sierra Leone, and by extension much of West Africa, can be identified through vegetation patterns (vegetation signatures) detectable in very high-resolution (VHR) multispectral satellite imagery. Settlement sites typically have a differing pattern of vegetation from the surrounding landscape, including concentrations of very large trees with sociocultural and historical significance: cotton (Ceiba pentandra) and baobab (Adansonia digitata). These features are conspicuous elements of the landscape both from the ground and in aerial imagery. Two complementary methods of using VHR multispectral satellite imagery are discussed in this paper: visual interpretation and semi-automated subpixel classification. These techniques are aiding ongoing archaeological survey of the Sierra Leone River Estuary. The impact of recently renewed industrial activity at a site of probable archaeological significance is also assessed through visually interpreted VHR satellite imagery.     

Population-change determinants in an early transitional society: the western Sierra Leone example

The author examines the role of geographical and historical processes in village population changes in western Sierra Leone as an example, with particular emphasis on the impact of migration. Both official census and unpublished data are used. Changes in population settlement over the period 1911 to 1963 are reviewed     

Right-Sizing International Criminal Justice: The Hybrid Experiment at the Special Court for Sierra Leone

In the decade since their establishment, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have made great advancements in the development of international criminal justice. Nonetheless, the ad hoc tribunals have been roundly criticized for their expense, inefficiency and slowness. When the Security Council decided to set up a court for Sierra Leone, it wanted to find a new model. The hybrid Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is an effort to right-size international criminal justice: it has a pared-down budget, tightly focused mandate, limited time of operation, and a lack of institutional links to the Security Council. The negotiations over these issues led to repeated clashes between the UN Secretary General and the Security Council, with the Security Council consistently favouring a more modestly sized court. The SCSL has much to recommend it but its promise is shadowed by the paltry resources available to it. In its efforts to avoid creating another over-sized tribunal, the Security Council swung too far in the other direction. The lofty goals of ending impunity and providing justice demand more than a court on the cheap.     

Canada's history wars: indigenous genocide and public memory in the United States,Australia and Canada

In this article, I explore the slow development of a national debate in Canada about genocide in the Indian residential schools, which I compare to earlier ‘history wars’ in Australia and the United States. In the first section I begin with a brief introduction to the history of the IRS system and some of its legacies, as well as attempts at redress. These include financial compensation through the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement, an official apology and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has been a nodal point for articulating claims of genocide. I follow this in the second section with an analysis of the history wars in the United States and Australia over indigenous genocide, before engaging in the third section with debates about genocide in Canada. Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia.     

Global Incorporation and Local Conflict: Sierra Leonean Mining Regions

Abstract: This paper draws upon a world‐system core–periphery framework to examine the nature and causes of persistent low‐level conflict in Sierra Leonean mining regions. Conflict is endemic because of asymmetrical power relations between global core‐state corporations and peripheral weak‐state Sierra Leone, which are mirrored locally within its mining regions. Structural constraints inherent in these relationships generate and sustain socioeconomic, cultural and environmental inequities. The paper reveals the complex web of micropolitics in the mining locale core‐periphery microcosm involving a weak state, exploitative corporations and oppressive traditional social hierarchies. The findings are relevant to effective policy making and conflict resolution.     

Insect Clay Geophagy in Sierre Leone

Field study in eastern Sierra Leone shows that 50% of pregnant women regularly consume clay found in the interior of termite mounds. Some 40 to 80 grams of clay are eaten per day. Another, but less commonly used, geophagical source of clay is the nest of the mud daubing wasp. Both clays provide important amounts of minerals and trace elements essential for fetal development. It is concluded that the practice is a cultural response to nutritional need.